eGroups

eGroups.com was an email list management web site. The site allowed users to create their own mailing lists and allowed others to sign up for membership on the list. The web site provided archives of the messages as well as list management functionality. Each group also had a shared calendar, file space, group chat, and a simple database. It was bought by Yahoo! and became part of Yahoo! Groups.

History

The service was started by Scott Hassan in 1997 as an email list archiving service called FindMail (mimicking the name "FindLaw", a company co-founded by Martin Roscheisen). Carl V. Page, Jr. joined the company in May 1997. When Martin Roscheisen joined as CEO in March 1998, FindMail was incorporated (in June 1998) and shifted its focus towards hosting email groups. FindMail, then renamed eGroups, quickly grew to 250,000 users before taking a venture finance round of $810,000 from Atlas Venture in May 1998. In October 1998, with 1.2 million users (growing at 12,000 users per day), Excite offered to acquire the company for $40m but the company decided instead to take $5.1 million more investment money from Sequoia Capital.

In Sept 1999, eGroups started work on an initial public offering but instead merged with ONElist, with 13 million users exchanging more than 1.3 billion email messages each month. In January 2000, the company raised a further $42 million and filed a S1 with the SEC on March 23, 2000.^[1]

In August 2000, with 18 million users, the company was bought by Yahoo! for $432m in a stock deal and became Yahoo! Groups.^[2]

References